In Class

Screening

Spanish field recordist Francisco Lopez: “The move away from the representational and documentative does not essentially depend on transformation of sounds but fundamentally on the listening mode we carry out,” Listen to La Selva.

Leah Barclay’sRiver Listening project involves immersive community engagement through interactive listening labs, field recording, sound maps, performances and installations to experiment with digital technologies and creativity in understanding river health and aquatic biodiversity. Here are some example sounds from a GPS soundwalk that took place in Brisbane, Australia.

Despite the longing for technology to provide a disinterested position, the microphone does not stand apart from the struggle and represent it dispassionately. Rather, it and the listening it organizes is a part of the production of the conditions of struggle. Listening is a site for the organization of politics. To help conceptualize this process, the formulation can be written: sound field + organizing = soundscape.

If we have time: Loss of context: How did Hugo Zemp’s Solomon Islands recordings become a hit for Deep Forest and later for Jan Garbarek?

Further Research

On the subject of the mysteries of the deep: An array of underwater research microphones (AKA “hydrophones”) have detected several unexplained deep-ocean sounds over the years. “Bloops” have been recorded several times since 1997 and were eventually classified as the disintegration of icebergs. Maybe it’s a sea monster from pre-history? H.P. Lovecraft fans think it’s the stirrings of the ancient alien overlord R’lyeh and skeptics dismiss it as one of many unknown sounds in the deep ocean.NOTE: The NOAA hydrophone array that detected the “bloop” is a leftover Cold War surveillance system formerly called SOSUS. It was designed to detect and classify the sounds of Soviet submarines across the world’s oceans.